22/04/2015
During a routine inspection
Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice
We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Dr Chakrabarti Surgery on 22 April 2015.
Overall the practice is rated as good. We found the practice to be good for providing safe, well-led, effective, caring and responsive services.
Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:
- Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. All opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised.
- Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
- Patients’ needs were assessed and care was planned and delivered following best practice guidance.
- Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.
- Patients told us they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
- Information was provided to help patients understand the care available to them.
- The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and staff.
- The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. High standards were promoted and owned by all practice staff with evidence of team working across all roles.
We also saw areas of outstanding practice:
- The practice had a nurse who worked across three practices who assisted with the care of the over 75 age group population within the practice. This nurse carried out home visits and dementia assessments in the patient’s own home.
- The practice offered a separate area to nursing mothers to breast feed their babies; mothers could access this area at any time during surgery hours.
In addition the provider should:
- Ensure staff awareness relating to serious adverse incidents is raised and they are empowered to complete the documentation themselves rather than asking the practice manager to do this.
- Ensure re-audit dates are documented on all audits to ensure the full cycle is completed and reported upon.
- Ensure communication with the multi-disciplinary team is formally recorded and strengthen links with this team.
- Ensure there is an auditable system for reviewing and monitoring the recording of serial numbers on blank hand written prescriptions pads held in storage and once allocated to GPs.
Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP)
Chief Inspector of General Practice